What are interim storage facilities?

View of the interim storage facility Gorleben Source: BGZ

There are 16 interim storage sites in Germany, mainly storing spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power plants and research reactors, but also high-level radioactive waste from reprocessing. The high-level radioactive waste is stored in transport and storage casks to protect humans and the environment. Interim storage takes place in specially designed storage buildings made of reinforced concrete. Yet, this is not a permanent solution. The materials will remain in temporary storage there until a final storage site has been found.

Since 2020, almost all German interim storage facilities have been operated by BGZ mbH. Exceptions are the Interim Storage Facility North
near Lubmin (operator: EWN Entsorgungswerk für Nuklearanlagen GmbH), the Brunsbüttel Interim Storage Facility (operator: Kernkraftwerk Brunsbüttel GmbH & Co. oHG) and the Jülich Interim Storage Facility (operator: Jülicher Entsorgungsgesellschaft für Nuklearanlagen mbH).

History of interim storage in Germany

The concept of interim storage was developed in the 1970s. The central interim storage facilities at Ahaus and Gorleben were designed as part of the so-called nuclear fuel cycle. The plan at the time was to recover a large part of the remaining nuclear fuel from spent fuel elements at a German reprocessing plant (nuclear fuel cycle). The resulting waste was to be stored at the central interim storage facilities.
Reprocessing was tested on a small scale in a reprocessing plant in Karlsruhe from 1971 onwards. However, initial plans to build an industrial reprocessing plant in Germany were aborted at the end of the 1970s. In 1979, the Minister President of Lower Saxony, Ernst Albrecht, announced the political end of the reprocessing plant planned for Gorleben in Lower Saxony. When the construction of a reprocessing plant at the Wackersdorf site was also abandoned, nuclear power plant operators began transporting the remaining nuclear fuel to Great Britain and France for reprocessing.

Transports to reprocessing plants abroad

This disposal system required a large number of transports, namely between the power plants, the reprocessing plants and the central interim storage facilities. To avoid such transports, the legislator amended the Atomic Energy Act in 2002, and obliged the nuclear power plant operators to temporarily store the spent fuel elements in the vicinity of the reactors (decentralised). Transport for reprocessing has been prohibited since 2005.
Since then, spent fuel elements that have reached the end of their service life have been placed in temporary storage at twelve on-site interim storage facilities near the reactors, with the aim of eventually transferring them to a final storage facility. In other words, the concept of direct final storage is being pursued. In addition to the twelve on-site interim storage facilities, the Jülich and Lubmin (Interim Storage North) interim storage facilities occupy a special position. Like the decentralised storage facilities, they are located in the immediate vicinity of a nuclear facility, but they were not built by an energy supply company, and were built before 2000.
In addition to the spent fuel elements that may no longer be taken to reprocessing, the waste produced during reprocessing must also be stored. At present, German reprocessing waste from the time before 2005 is still stored at the corresponding plants abroad.

No more return transports to Gorleben

With the Site Selection Act, the legislator also amended the Atomic Energy Act, meaning that, as of 1 January 2014, the energy suppliers have had to ensure that the remaining radioactive waste was no longer stored at the Gorleben interim storage facility, but at several interim storage facilities close to the site.
The aim was to avoid giving the impression that the Gorleben exploration mine, where initial tunneling work had been done in the past, had already been determined as a final repository site in the scope of the new search for a final repository for high-level radioactive waste, which had started in parallel. The radioactive residues from the reprocessing process that had been retrieved by 01/01/2014 are stored at the Gorleben interim storage facility.